I train mainly in soft skills such as management, customer service, assertiveness, conflict resolution and negotiation. Planning training sessions and writing manuals is the easy bit; the real challenge is to engage each learner and encourage them to explore new ways of thinking and doing.
Before every workshop I spend some time thinking about my new group of learners: what difficulties are they facing, what do they want from this course? I try to consciously open my mind to them. The last thing I want to do is to replay a workshop that was needed by a different group of learners with a different set of problems and challenges.
Engaging each learner requires powerful listening and respect for the participant’s prior experience. Enabling people to articulate what they feel are their problems and challenges in the workplace, is usually the first step to enabling them to explore more productive ways of acting and thinking.
Fresh insights precede acceptance of new ideas or new models of thinking and acting, and to develop those new insights the trainer needs to tap into the experience of others in the group. The trainer facilitates group interaction by modelling a way of interacting respectfully, by introducing trigger questions or exercises that stimulate productive discussion, and at the appropriate time, introducing new models, ideas and techniques. And a powerful part of this group dynamic is the trainer’s own experience and observation.
The process of active learning is accelerated by exercises that stimulate thinking on a number of levels and by combining an experience of doing something oneself (for example, acting as the team leader in a role play) with the experience of observing and giving feedback on someone else doing that same thing.
As people gain new insights they instinctively want to revisit difficult situations from the past. So at some stage in the workshop a string of questions will arise about what could have been done or said differently in given situations. The trainer and the rest of the group now act as a sounding board, and have the opportunity to both challenge and refine ideas. And it is this stage, when people are deepening their insights and developing more powerful and productive action plans, that makes me passionate about training.
Post by Anne Watkins, Principal Trainer
